


Katabasis

by GoldenDemon



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Character Study, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 17:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17125940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenDemon/pseuds/GoldenDemon
Summary: Night in the Kingdom of Snows.“Tell me where the Horde forward base is, and where Force Captain Catra has taken the other princesses, or I will kill your friend,” she says, and Kyle has never believed anyone more in his life.





	Katabasis

Night, in the Kingdom of Snows. The mountain peaks tore at Etheria’s skies; colder, faster winds bled down them, howling katabatic gales that froze you down to the bone.

“Where is the Horde’s forward base?” asked Frosta, yelling at the top of her diminutive lungs to be heard over the shrieking wind.

“I-I won’t tell you!” Kyle said, his eyes squeezed shut against the stinging snow. And, well, out of fear. Wrists bound, he desperately clutched at the strong arm of the Kingdom of Snows soldier dangling him over the edge by his thin red-and-white shirt.

“This crevasse is almost a hundred meters deep!” Frosta said. “I guarantee you the fall will shatter every bone in your legs. When you inevitably fail to drag yourself out with your arms alone, we will leave you there to die of exposure! The glacier will grind your corpse to powder. _Tell me where the base is!_ ”

Kyle closed his eyes even tighter and said nothing. His ears burned. His hands burned. His eyeballs felt like ice cubes beneath his lids. He couldn’t even feel his nose anymore. There was only the shrieking of the wind. The moment stretched.

Frosta gave a huff. “Fine,” she said. “Pull him back.”

Instant, hot, embarrassing relief coursed through Kyle, his eyes snapping open as he was hauled back onto firmer footing on the glacial ice. A noise that was maybe a laugh, or maybe a whimper, escaped him as he was tossed back to Lonnie and Rogelio.

In the tiny pool of light from her guards’ lantern, Frosta’s eyes were as cold as the wind. You saw that look, sometimes, in the Horde. If Kyle had been in the business of expecting things or thinking about the future, ever, which he was not, he might have been surprised to see it here. “Her next,” she said, with a toss of her head towards Lonnie.

Lonnie kicked, and screamed. It took three guards to drag her to the edge, and they were forced to hold her between them as if making ready to throw her, rather than dangling her as they had with Kyle.

Frosta watched this impassively for a moment, and then turned back to Kyle, and it's a bit like watching a training holotape on fast-forward but everything is suddenly very real, and very _immediate_ , and

* * *

“Tell me where the Horde forward base is, and where Force Captain Catra has taken the other princesses, or I will kill your friend,” she says, and Kyle has never believed anyone more in his life.

“Kyle, don’t you fucking-” Lonnie begins, her eyes spitting sparks, anger and always fear, fear, underneath it, but he is already speaking, already desperately blurting out the answer.

“Thornpeak! It’s on the far side of Mount Thornpeak,” he says. “It’s hidden by the overhang, you can only get in by air.”

There is another long, screaming silence.

“Bring them,” Frosta says at last, already determinedly stamping off through the snow. “Move, there’s no time to waste.” She brushes within an inch of Kyle, her head level with his own where he has been forced to his knees, and as she passes he sees her expression falter for the first time. There is a terrible worry in her, a black and howling fear like the night that surrounds them. In that unguarded sliver of a moment, she is not a princess; she is just a scared young girl.

“I can’t believe you,” Lonnie mutters angrily as they are jostled back together and marched after the princess. “You’re like a fucking marshmallow, Kyle.” No matter that he’d been too scared of the Horde to save his own life – as close as he was ever going to get to courage. He knew it as well as she did – there was no such thing as half-successes in the Horde. There were only entire failures. Kyle is used to failure. He exhales, and the world is no longer so liquid-clear, so immanent, so fast, and

* * *

 “Sorry, Lonnie,” he said sheepishly in response, but he wasn’t. Frosta was already half out of sight in the blizzard, but as Kyle watched her retreating back, he thought he understood her, there, and why she’d done what she did.

After all, he didn’t have many friends left either.


End file.
